Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign. Sherard Cowper-Coles

at us all to take cover, as his colleagues did so, diving under our vehicles. Another loud boom followed, and then another. Only then did a rather shame-faced Royal Military Police captain realise that we were hearing the Afghan Army’s twenty-one-gun salute, fired on one of their ancient Russian 130mm howitzers, not the first evidence of a terrorist attack. It was an incident we would not allow him to forget.

      The rest of David Miliband’s programme unfolded more or less as planned. Over the next three years the building blocks of such visits were to become all too familiar. For visiting politicians we always tried to include a meeting with representatives of Afghan ‘civil society’, as we liked to call it: NGOs, women MPs, religious leaders, activists of all kinds, people of courage and conviction, fighting to make their country a genuinely better place. Then there was the obligatory briefing lunch or dinner with ‘internationals’ – the ISAF Commander, the UN Special Representative, the US Ambassador, perhaps the Canadian Ambassador, the EU representatives (one from the Commission, one from the Council Secretariat), the NATO Senior Civilian Representative and one or two other prominent or persuasive internationals.

      The choreography of such occasions varied only slightly: the visiting guest of honour would emphasise his government’s support and admiration for all that those resident in Kabul were doing for Afghanistan, especially on the military side; he would ask a series of questions which purported to be penetrating, but which seldom cut through to the real issues; in response, there would be a table round, during which everyone expressed cautious optimism, stressing that the strategy was on the right lines, that the international (or national) effort was more joined up than ever, but that major challenges remained: the fault lay with the Afghans, who weren’t responding in the ways that they should to massive international efforts to help them build democracy, prosperity and the rule of law. The meal would end with the visitor saying what a good discussion it had been, and everyone expressing mild satisfaction at the way things were going – despite the challenges that remained …

      David Miliband was different. He didn’t merely mouth platitudes. He was genuinely keen to learn. He said when he didn’t understand, or wasn’t persuaded. But however politely our local American guests listened to our concerns about the way they were running the war, all of us knew that the real decisions were taken in Washington, not in London or Kabul. And that what we on the front line thought or said or did counted for little back in the village beside the Potomac.

      The next morning David Miliband had his first proper talk, over breakfast at the palace, with President Karzai. I confess that it did not go quite as well as I had hoped. The President was his usual charming and charismatic self. He conveyed his best wishes to the Queen and the Prince of Wales, and expressed his admiration for Britain in general and for the royal family in particular. He thanked us for what our troops were doing in Helmand. He moved on to explain why so many of Afghanistan’s problems came from Pakistan, and alluded to his suspicion that the British Government was closer to Pakistan’s rulers than it should be.

      The Foreign Secretary tried to move off generalities to real and urgent issues: the state of security, the spread of the insurgency, government capacity, the training of the Afghan police and army. He got few substantive answers. And I learned later that President Karzai felt that the new young British Foreign Secretary hadn’t been as respectful as perhaps he should have been.

      We flew south to Camp Bastion and transferred to a Chinook for the fifteen-minute hop to Lashkar Gah. We were briefed by the British Task Force Chief of Staff and by the eager civilians of the Provincial Reconstruction Team. We met Governor Wafa of Helmand, with his long white beard, and old-fashioned manners and attitudes to match. From him we heard polite and wholly insincere courtesies about what British forces were doing, and promises about better government. It was a charade, and both sides knew it. And before we had had time properly to think or talk about what we had seen and heard, the Foreign Secretary was on the Royal Squadron’s BAE 146 back to Bahrain, and I was on the C-130 to Kabul, wondering how I would frame the draft minute to the Prime Minister which the Foreign Secretary had asked me to prepare.

      Sunday 26 July was not a good day. My diary tells me that I got up at six, and drafted a telegram reporting on the Foreign Secretary’s visit, and the outline of the draft minute from the Foreign Secretary to the Prime Minister. Then it was the usual series of back-to-back meetings, ending with a dinner with internationals to discuss the Afghan National Development Strategy, a framework devised at the London Conference in February 2006, which was supposed to enfold all our efforts. But what spoilt everything that day was the news that the United States Government was planning to insist on going ahead with aerial spraying of the Afghan poppy crop, against our wishes and, much more important, against those of the Afghan Government. We had a fight on our hands, a fight which we would win only by telling the Afghan Government that HMG would support it in resisting US pressure to agree to spraying – to the fury of the US Government, or at least parts of it.

      By the end of July, I had been in Kabul for only just over two months, and yet already I was behaving like an old hand. Such was the turnover of officials, and the pace of business, that everyone fell into the same trap: of substituting acquaintance for knowledge, activity for understanding, reporting for analysis, quantity of work for quality. I was determined to try to do better. So I did attempt in the months that followed to get to know as much as I could of the history and human geography of the country the West was trying to remake, or, as our forebears might have put it, prepare for self-government.

      I also insisted that the Embassy staff should do the same. If we wanted, we could have spent all day, every day, in meetings with other members of the international community. But that was not why we were in Kabul. We were there mainly to understand and influence Afghanistan and the Afghans, and to report on both to London. We owed it to our troops to get out and about.

      Chapter 7

      The Spreading Virus

      Within weeks of my arrival in Kabul, the team of diplomats and intelligence officers in the British Embassy came to realise that the outlook on the political and security fronts was trending downwards. None of us thought that things were going off a cliff. Nor did any of us judge that the situation was irreversible. But we did believe that, without ‘course corrections’ (the rather coy phrase I used when briefing visitors), the prospects for the Western effort to stabilise Afghanistan were not good.

      I realised only much later that I had not understood in 2007 that in truth the underlying situation then was even more serious than I had been prepared to admit. That spring and summer I still thought that we would have a good chance of turning things round merely by adjusting our counter-insurgency tactics, reflecting lessons learned in Malaya, Algeria, Vietnam or Northern Ireland. I had not grasped the extent to which we lacked a coherent overarching political strategy. By nature an optimist, and eager to sound upbeat and constructive to London, I thus started work with the British Embassy team on two initiatives intended to raise our counter-insurgency game.

      We did so against a steady drumbeat of indications that security was deteriorating across the country. It wasn’t just the access maps provided by the UN, which showed fewer and fewer districts considered safe for operations by NGOs and other non-parties to the conflict. It was also anecdotal evidence from Afghans, who were no longer able, or at least willing, to visit their cousins in the provinces around Kabul or to travel by road to Kandahar. Added to this were the statistics of a steady rise in incidents, or SIGACTs (SIGnificant ACTions), recorded by NATO forces, and by the reputable Afghan NGO Safety Office. We reported this to London, in a series of telegrams, as objectively as we could.

      Although David Miliband and the Afghan team in the FCO, as well as civilian analysts across government, broadly accepted our judgements, the analysts in the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Intelligence Service (DIS) were more doubtful. According to their analysis, security in Afghanistan had actually improved during the 2007 fighting season. What had not improved was the perception of security, which – the DIS conceded – was trending in the wrong direction. But the reality, they claimed, was that the insurgency was contracting.

Such problems were not unique to the British DIS, but affect, to a greater or lesser extent, all military intelligence services. The old joke about ‘military intelligence’